London. Bloomsbury, rather. There is a difference. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge in the family division, is at home nursing a single malt Talisker and wondering how she came by that Renoir all those years ago. Was it at the same time she bought a Shakespeare First Folio? These details temporarily escaped her as her mind was focused on the shocking declaration her husband had made several minutes earlier.

“I’m going to have an affair with one of my students,” he had said. Her first reaction had been to laugh. Jack was 60 years old. How come it had taken him so long to have a midlife crisis? “We haven’t made love for seven weeks, four days and five hours,” he had continued. “I want one last shot at sex.” Proximity to Jack’s ageing penis once every two months or so seemed quite often enough to Fiona, but she kept her counsel on this as she had some important judgments to make. Instead, she just told him to “Bugger orf” and that she would be changing the locks.

Fiona poured herself another Talisker and reread the Law Society reports on the Gillick Competency. Inadequate, she felt, for the authors had omitted to include references to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. But not every judge had quite the refinement of her sensibilities. Ah, well. She selected Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s Winterreise to play on the Bang & Olufsen and continued to ruminate on the brilliance of some of her other judgments. The Jewish conjoined twins, in which she had quoted the Satires of Juvenal; Lord Scarman, no less, had declared she had shown the wisdom of Solomon.

Her reverie was interrupted by her phone’s ringtone. Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. It was her clerk at chambers. She was required to make an urgent judgment on the case of a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness called Adam, who was refusing a blood transfusion that might save his life during chemotherapy. “Was he old enough to make an informed decision?” she wondered. Her mind tormented, Fiona sought solace in Goethe, but even he couldn’t provide her with an answer. There was nothing to be done but to visit the boy in his south London hospital.

“I hear that your piano accompaniment to the Lord Justice singing the Brahms lieder at the Law Society dinner has been the the talk of the Inner Temple,” her driver said. Fiona smiled politely, but she was feeling distracted. As the car sped through Clapham, she recoiled at the burnt-out tenements and the bodies of crack dealers piled up in the open sewers of the favelas of south London. Eventually, she reached the sanctuary of the hospital and was admitted to the ward, where she was surprised to find the boy playing a Bach violin partita. Perhaps his life was more valuable than she had thought.

“I do still want to die,” Adam said.

“Do you know this poem by WB Yeats?” she replied. “Benjamin Britten has composed a wonderful musical arrangement of it.”

“I don’t,” he said, “But now I do, I want to live after all.”

Fiona returned home to write her judgment through which the immortal words of Gloria Gaynor would undoubtedly resound. After that, she would try to resolve her conflicted feelings about Jack. Maybe she should one day enquire if the insertion of his penis into a foreign body had indeed taken place.

“That was a truly wondrous judgment in the Jehovah’s Witness case,” said Lord Justice Justice. “Let us perform the Mahler together next year.” From time to time over the following months, Fiona would get letters from the boy, telling her how much he was enjoying the poetry of WB Yeats, but she felt it best not to reply. Instead, she learned the Mahler on her Steinway while reaching other marvellous judgments.

On the night of the Law Society Ball, shortly after everyone had agreed that the Mahler she and Lord Justice Justice had played had been transcendent, Fiona received a call that rocked her to the core. Being a Family Court judge could be extremely onerous at times. She returned home to find Jack listening to the Blue Danube and reading Larkin. Were these compromises she was really ready to make?